Ok, just curious, who is the oldest person here? I am 39. While I feel that 39 isn't old in terms of life, in the terms of web development, usually I feel like the old fart in the group (was second oldest at web development company I used to work at that had about 30 employees)

Got my first computer (Commodore Vic20) back in 1985. Was on dial in BBSes and programming for them from 89 till around 97/98. Started on this "internet fad" (what the owner of a local 32 line BBS referred to it as when his sales of charging $6/month were slipping) in 96, did perl programming until introduced to PHP in 1999. Loved it ever since!

Also did stand alone apps in QuickBasic back in the day for dos systems and then later Visual Basic 6.0.

I myself used cBase on my commodore 64 and then Maximus BBS when I switched to a PC. (very configurable, all the way down to it's own compilable language to actually program its behavior).

The multilingual systems in the area all used TBBS/TDBS (TDBS was basically DBase IV, modified for BBS environment). There were 2 32 line boards and one 16 line board in the Akron, Ohio area. Actually as a side project, I'm getting a copy of one of them back up and running on an old Win98 system and setting it up so people can telnet into it. There is a bunch of use on a group on facebook that used to live our lives on the BBS's. Literally parties just about every weekend and a big extended 9and disfynctional) family LOL

I'm also converting games my friend wrote for TBBS over to facebook games. Trick will be finding someone who can make them graphically appealing.

But I'm not really a professional developer; I was in industry before computers were used for anything besides Payroll. After college and a short stint in very early television (behind the camera) and 5 years in the Navy during the Korean conflict, I worked in the Analog Computer Lab at Convair, San Diego (my supervisor had been the lab assistant to Dr. Lee DeForest, inventor of the vacuum tube!). Then grad school and years of non-computer management jobs, then I got involved with some mainframe programming as a side issue of my real job in a Systems & Procedures department. Then somebody invented personal computers!! I got hooked and wrote Applesoft Basic programs for the Apple ][. When I finally retired from Unisys, I started teaching business computing and database classes (dBase II and then MS Access) and Internet classes in the local community colleges. I also did some database consulting until I really retired about a decade later. Since then, I've done some backend web development (PHP, MySQL) for several nonprofit organizations, and some personal websites. It's not easy for Gramps to keep current on all the new stuff (I'm just learning jQuery), but I think I do know a little about how people learn, which is why I enjoy the forum so much.

My first experience with computers was in 1958, but I'm not sure anyone here would call it "computer experience." I had just graduated from Electrician's Mate school in the Navy and was waiting for my ship to return from the Med so I could join it. I was in what was called the "Boatswain's Locker," meaning avaliable for general scutwork assignment, at Anacostia near Washington DC and got sent to a building that was being readied to house a new computer. It was big enough to house a football field (and was going to house one computer), and had a false floor which had squares which lifted out. We were assigned to clean it, as in essentailly sterilize it.

At one point the supervisor said, "Here, let me show you something cool." He had us put all of the squares in the false floor, and then turned on the blower that blew air into the space under the floor and would eventually blow it up through the computer for cooling. The squares sort of rippled all over the football-field-sized building. Wierd, and kind of spooky.

About thirty years later (1981 actually) I became a programmer, but between those two dates I had pretty much nothing to do with computers.

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